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On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Nick Rout wrote:

> What does North Bridge & South Bridge mean in relation to motherboard
> chipsets?

The North Bridge is the chip which implements the CPU interface (commonly
called the Front Side Bus), the memory interface, and these days AGP
interface. It's connected to the South Bridge as well, which usually runs
the onboard devices like the IDE controllers, sound, legacy stuff (eg, ISA
slots), and other fluff.

The north bridge/south bridge connection could be a variety of things,
it's most likely the be PCI (and thus, your PCI slots hang off this
connection), or if you've got a more recent board it could be PCI-X,
Hypertransport, V-Link, etc and in those cases the PCI slots probably hang
off the south bridge.

When people refer to the motherboard chipset, they most often mean just
the north bridge and south bridge.

- -- 
"I know of no technological device at this time that would [prevent
priracy] and if it did exist, it would only be a matter of days before the
[..] manufacturers would have an override piece of equipment on their
machine and you would start from ground zero again."
   -- Jack Valenti, President of the MPAA (1982)
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